You know... if slashdot allowed editing, I would care more.

I often edit posts on other sites four to seven times to get them right.

Here... since I can't edit. I don't really give a shit. Plus it t was late.. almost 1am. I was tired.

I'm sure spelling errors bother you because you have never ever had a misspelling in anything you posted on the interwebs so sorry for offending your perfection.

You really misread my post. I didn't even hint that I "despise asocial persons." I was one myself for ever. I'm a strong introvert and found social situations uncomfortable.

But my company sent me to Dale Carnegie classes and it changed my life. If nothing else, I have a "script" to follow in social situations which prevent me or others from being awkward and uncomfortable.

And I learned people make decisions emotionally first- then they weight the facts to fit their emotional decision.

If someone likes you, they weight facts in your favor.

Which means they bend procedures for you, give you a little slack on your deadline, understand your reasons for being late instead of discounting them.
So then I finally understood the value of socializing.

Of course it doesn't.

But that's not why children as young as 14 already show an extreme gender bias with regard to programming. 85% to 15%.

To repeat my other post.

It wasn't 95%.

The classes started out 80% male, 20% female.
There was a 70% dropout/failure/degree change rate overall.
Roughly 95% of the females who started dropped out. Leaving them at about 1-2% of the population by the senior year.
Roughly 65% of the males who started dropped out. Leaving them at about 98-99% of the population by the senior year.

Of that 1-2%- no females programmed recreationally outside of school or work.
Of the 98-99%- about half programmed recreationally outside of school and work.

After a few years- that recreational activity clearly showed up in their careers.

I've known one female programmer who loves computers and programs recreationally and she constantly gets job offers and was even recruited by google but chose not to work there because she of her son's behavioral problems (asberger's mother plus asberger's father with high pain threshhold == stimulation/violence loving child who doesn't feel pain).

Is sexism a problem? Absolutely.
Is harassment a problem. Absolutely.

We had annual training on it where I worked.

My only point is that google and apple are going to be choosing employees who excel in their field. And if you don't love your field and spend your personal time on it in addition to work time- then you probably are not going to excel in your field.

Some females are more capable than most males in the field. But on average, females don't like IT. It's good pay- long hours- low status.

It wasn't 95% remaining men.

In my degree program/year, we had 1500ish cosc students in the program of whom only 450 were expected to graduate and get degrees. This was intentional- if we had too many graduates the school's accreditation would be rescinded.

So among students overall, 30% graduated, 70% failed, left the program, quit school, etc. I had good friends who failed and disappeared. And I knew a lot of folks who opted out for easier degrees.

70% of students left the program on average. 95% of females left the program on average. So over 65% of the males didn't make it either.

We had three weedout courses. Database had an average of 20 hours a week of homework with some weeks of 40 hours of homework. I went 40 hours without sleep before walking into the mid term. This was on top of homework for other classes.

Natural languages weeded out a lot of students but I actually made a difference from there. I figured out the "magical" phrase to ask the professor that changed his class from a 70% failure rate to a 30% failure rate. (It was "Could you give me a 'trivial' example of this?). He wanted us to succeed but he was not going low enough for us to grasp the first rung of the ladder.

And of course microlanguages and assembly got the rest. Similarly very high homework requirements. I scammed that course because I already knew assembly language- having picked it up when I was 16 on my own.

You don't get through something like that unless you love the field.

Wow, so you started with 80% females and of the 20% males, 15% dropped leaving you with 5% males?

How do you think that happened? It seems very unusual to me.

My degree was cosc - the field was IT.

There is a very big difference between the two. True COSC is more akin to theoretical math and almost no one who gets a cosc degree goes on to that level. Most go into IT and get a programming job.

Interesting, since I was good friends with many of them and the universal reason they said they quit was it was too damn hard. Most went to a business computer degree.

Not a single one of them said they had problems with the guys or the teachers.

At least a fifth of the males dropped too.

I'm not discounting sexual harassment as being a factor. But you know as well as I do that it's not 100% of the problem. Computer science- like engineering is very hard and usually has at least three "weedout" courses with high homework loads and high failure rates.

You have to be obsessed to get thru it. If you don't love computers- you wisely choose another degree.

Even today- the females at my last job programmed all day and then went home and were done. Most the guys too. But there was a subset of guys who stopped programming- went home- and then kept programming. If not on company stuff- then on their own stuff. I've met one female like that. And she was an awesome programmer.

Again- sexual harassment happens.
But it's a very hard degree. You have to love it and work on it when you are not required to work on it if you want to excel.

In my average IT class, we started with 20% females and finished with about 5% females.

I.e. they dropped at a higher rate. Most were not obsessed with computers enough to excel.

That creates a challenging pool to hire from.

Perhaps if IT people were not expected to be as obsessed and asocial as they are, it wouldn't happen.

There were zero IT parties in 4 years of collage. Heck my DND club had at least a couple parties a year.

Just so you know... SOX increased publicly head corporation projects from 1 day to 47 days at one company i worked at so the issue isn't isolated to government.

Basically- even a one *character* change had to be brought to the CEO's awareness.

So the programmer told their lead who told their manager who told their director who told their senior director who told the vps, cio, who told the ceo.

The end result wasn't that the ceo actually knew-- he basically signed off on the fact that everyone below him had discussed it and said it was going to be okay.

It was supposed to reduce risk but in my experience- the rate and duration of outages and bugs didn't really change.

When the ceo or a vp really wanted a project done quickly, various procedures and standards were set aside and it was bum rushed in.

Combine that with a testing environment that was 5% the capacity of production with outdated, non-representative test data and you had a lot of production issues that were not caught in test.

I changed over to a windows phone as it looks like its going to save me about $600 a year.

Win8 on a phone was a dream. Very tiny learning curve (hardest thing was opening a PDF*).

However, windows Surface has always seemed overpriced to me. As in 33% to 50% more.

The basic problem is that all my tablet needs can be met by a $150ish android tablet.

I prefer windows for my desktop. But there windows 8 is a bit more of a pain when using a mouse. I'll get used to it but i've been on the original windows paradigm and command lines since the early 1990s.

However- I made a complete shift to open source of my office functionality about 3 years ago. I will never buy an office suit again.

* Pdf readers have no "file open" functionality. You have to go to the red office tile and open the pdf there-- then it redirects you to the pdf reader of your choice. Once you've done this, you can reopen it in your PDF reader.

It was pretty bad in 1880. Then society stepped hard on businesses and showed them it wasn't going to accept that behavior. And companies mostly behaved until 1980.

In 1980 the new mantra of "a business's only duty is to it's share holders. it has no obligation or responsibility to benefit the rest of society. Indeed, if it would harm the shareholders to benefit society then it's wrong. And if harming society would benefit the shareholders, then it's right."

Like most things- there's a reasonable point in there. But it's been taken to an extreme I think it's just a matter of time til the governments get pissed off and do something about it (as they have for centuries).

That definition turns ugly repeatedly so often that the government has to get involved to stop the excesses (company stores, interlocking trusts, monopoly pricing, collusion, vertical market lock).

The bad thing here is that the government was subverted by business and is no longer acting as a check and balance.

A "free market" works for small businesses but not for large multi-national corporations and not even really for simply "large" corporations. It's sort of like how libertarianism can work under a strong government but fails badly when you have a weak government and very powerful people who use that power to abuse weaker people.

There's also a "moral" component which makes capitalism work and be beneficial and that's eroded a lot since 1980.

http://www.infoplease.com/worl...

For example:

"The school day in France typically runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a half day on Saturday, although students do not attend school on Wednesday or Sunday. Lunch is a two-hour break for public school students. Students usually attend school from ages 6 to 18. The average number of students per class is 23. Uniforms are not required, but religious dress of any kind is banned. The school year for this country in the northern hemisphere stretches from August to June, and is divided into four seven-week terms, with one to two weeks of vacation in between."

Part of a consideration for any school year is the parent's work schedule and child care.

It's about indoctrinating them to be one people to prevent a lot of civil strife later on and to make them cohesive in the face of national threats.

Public education unified the united states.

And it's about education. Producing a citizen base which is capable.

It seems to be a lot less about civics than it used to be.

It's layered too- a lot of ugly information is held back until you go to college.

I'm saying that indoctrination is not all bad. Lack of indoctrination results in some fairly bloody civil wars over fairly meaningless differences.

I wonder if a more dangerous vector would be a mutation that allowed it to have other carrier species. Something is carrying it now without dying. If some bird species got it without dying that could turn ugly.

I think it's more about the fatality rate. 50-90% vs 2-3% for really virulent flu like in 2009.

Even the spanish flu was about 15%.

Plus choking isn't nearly as dramatic as bleeding blood out of every orafice and even the skin.